‘Crimes of the Future’ finds ‘spookily’ timely horror in abortion rights, climate change parallels
In April, film distributor Neon released the squirmy first trailer for “Crimes of the Future,” teasing sexy surgery, a multi-eared man and a boy eating a plastic wastebasket.
But moviegoers expecting a gory thrill fest might be taken aback by director David Cronenberg’s sci-fi drama (now in theaters), which gets under your skin with its moving meditation on mortality and real-world issues.
“It’s very profound and very deep,” says actress Léa Seydoux, who co-stars with Viggo MortensenKristen Stewart. “David is much more than a filmmaker – he’s a philosopher and poet as well. There’s a line in the film that says, ‘We’re creating meaning out of emptiness.’ And that’s what he does.”
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Set in a grimy futuristic society where people are largely immune to feeling pain, “Crimes” centers on a pair of performance artists named Saul (Mortensen) and Caprice (Seydoux) who get erotic and creative satisfaction from doing public surgeries. Saul has the ability to rapidly grow new organs inside his body, which Caprice then removes in front of eager audiences. Their two-person show attracts the attention of a nosy detective (Welket Bungué) and mousy organ registrar (Stewart), as authorities attempt to keep tabs and crack down on these radical mutations.
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But two decades ago, he couldn’t have imagined just how timely “Crimes” would become.
Early last month, a leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court suggested it may overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing states to make abortion illegal. So when the movie premiered at Cannes Film Festival in France less than three weeks later, critics and journalists couldn’t help but draw parallels between real-life events and Cronenberg’s vision of a government trying to regulate people’s bodies.
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“Crimes” also has a pertinent message about global warming, imagining a dire future where the planet has become overrun by industrial waste and food has grown scarce. In response, a group of underground activists (led by Scott Speedman) have willfully altered their bodies so they’re able to digest plastics and survive on toxic chemicals.
“It’s like Jonathan Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal,’ where he suggested the solution to the Irish famine was that the Irish eat their children,” Cronenberg explains. “My satire is a little more gentle, saying, ‘Well, maybe the solution to plastic pollution is that we teach our bodies to feed on plastic and take nutrients from plastic.’
“Is it plausible? Well, it’s plausible. Is it likely? Maybe not. But I throw it into the mix. It’s part of a discussion.”
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